volume second, known as the Bedford Catalogue. With no especial vehemence, at least according to our own standards of repression, Sadler expresses himself upon some “extraordinary mistakes” in this work.
At the meeting of the Society, May 9, 1879, there was an attack upon Sadler, and it was led by Chambers, or conducted by Chambers, who cried out that Sadler had slandered a great astronomer, and demanded that Sadler should resign. In the report of this meeting, published in the Observatory, there is not a trace of anybody’s endeavors to find out whether there were errors in this book or not: Chambers ignored everything but his accusation of slander, and demanded again that Sadler should resign.
In Monthly Notices, 39-389, the Council of the Society published regrets that it had permitted publication of Sadler’s paper, “which was entirely unsupported by the citation of instances upon which his judgment was founded.”
We find that it was Mr. Chambers who had revised and published the new edition of Smyth’s Cycle.
In the English Mechanic, Chambers challenged Sadler to publish, say, fifty “stupid errors.” See page 451, vol. 33, English Mechanic—Sadler lists just fifty “stupid errors.” He says that he could have listed, not 50, but 250, not trivial, but of the “grossest kind.” He says that in one set of 167 observations, 117 were wrong.
The English Mechanic drops out of this comedy with the obvious title, but developments go on. Evidently withdrawing its “regrets,” the Council permitted publication of a criticism of Chambers’ edition of Smyth’s Cycle, in Monthly Notices, 40-497, and the language in this criticism, by S. W. Burnham, was no less interpretable as slanderous than was Sadler’s: that Smyth’s data were “either roughly approximate or grossly incorrect, and so constantly recurring that it was impossible to explain that they were ordinary errors of observation.” Burnham lists 30 pages of errors.
Following is a paper by E. B. Knobel, who published 17 pages of instances in which, in his opinion, Mr. Burnham had been too severe. Knowing of no objection by Burnham to this reduction, we have left 13 pages of errors in one standard astronomical
